They were packed full of content, too. Reviews, interviews, strategy guides, cheats and mods. Even the ads were cool. I kept a lot of my old game magazines, and they're still pretty fun to read through. Obviously, you have to grit and bear all the edgy "humor" and hornyness.

The 80s and 90s were a golden age for hobby magazines. I think by the late 00s, all the young writers (who have always made up the bulk of writers for magazines) started making tool-assisted content for content mills and blogspam, and that style of writing is what now dominates hobby magazines. Modern magazine content must be first and foremost slop for the web version of the magazine, and it's only later cobbled together into the physical version.